


When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears

by maximumfudanshi



Category: the GazettE
Genre: Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 09:35:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8322868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maximumfudanshi/pseuds/maximumfudanshi
Summary: Uruha, Reita, and Ruki watch the stars together. What Ruki says in the darkness isn't quite a question, but Reita knows he has to find an answer anyway.





	

Reita dozed with his forehead against the cool glass of the car window. When he opened his eyes a little every once in a while, he saw the warm glow of the console lights and sparse streetlights flashing past. Uruha and Ruki were in the front seats, talking quietly. The whole situation reminded him oddly of car trips with his parents as a kid. He would always fall asleep in the back seat on the late drive home from his grandparent’s house…

But they weren’t going home now, they were driving out into the dark, an hour out of the city. When he heard Ruki gasp, he finally shook himself awake and leaned forward to see what they had come all this way for.

The first meteor was already gone, but as he watched another appeared, a white shock in the dark countryside sky. Ruki turned around to look at him, making sure he was seeing. He rubbed at his eyes and returned Ruki’s smile.

“Ah! It’s starting! They move fast, think we can beat them?” Uruha was laughing, accelerating.

“Hey, hey,” Reita scolded halfheartedly, still drowsy, before giving up and letting the guitarist speed to his heart’s content. He never could make Uruha do anything. He leaned against the back of the passenger seat and watched over Ruki’s shoulder, a few more of the first meteors of the night crossing the sky in front of them as they drove on.

After a few more miles, Uruha slowed down, looking for the unmarked side road that would lead them to an uncle’s friend’s land- or was it a friend’s uncle’s? Reita knew he had met the guy once, at some family gathering when he and Uruha had snuck down from Uruha’s room, on a mission to get snacks without running into anyone who wanted to hug them. He didn’t remember anything else about him though. Uruha said he was nice, that he had let Uruha come here to watch meteor showers a few times when he was a kid, though for some reason, Reita hadn’t been invited.

In fact this was the first time he’d ever seen real meteors. As they took a left off the main road and bumped slowly down a very long driveway, he decide that the thrill of never knowing when they would come really did make it better than just watching a video on youtube. Ruki was right again. He was glad he had come.

Uruha finally parked at the side of the driveway and cut the engine. He left the headlights on as his bandmates pulled the blankets and cooler out of the backseat. He stepped up onto the runningboard and put his elbows on the roof of the car, staring at the house far across the property. There was only one dim light shining on the porch of the sleeping house; he supposed shooting stars eventually lost their magic for people who could see the sky like this every night. But he had gotten so used to the eternally purplish sky of the city that the stars seemed unfamiliar to him. Unfamiliar, yet nostalgic. This reminded him of his childhood with Reita, staying out late at summer festivals or sneaking out onto the blue tile roof at midnight during sleepovers. There were never quite this many stars in their hometown sky, but he wondered if Reita was remembering the same things.

But Reita was already following Ruki along the path of light shining across the grass. He watched them pick a spot away from the trees and spread the blanket out. When they waved at him, he turned the ignition off and headed toward them, stumbling a little over the bumpy ground. His eyes hadn’t quite adjusted to the dark yet.

His friends were already laying down when he approached, Reita with a can of beer sitting on the ground beside him. There was room enough for him next to Reita, but there was more room on Ruki’s other side, so he sat down there and flopped onto his back. They were right on time, one a.m. and the real show was beginning. He tried to count the meteors as they fell, but there were too many to keep up. So many all at once, they looked like rain. He wondered what would happen if two of them hit each other. Was that even possible? He got the feeling it was a dumb question. And besides, he’d had a confusing day already, and he had other things to think about, so he simply listened in to his bandmates’ conversation instead of asking. 

“This is kind of nostalgic,” Ruki was saying.

“What, you’ve see a meteor shower before?” Reita questioned him.

“Uh- huh.”

“When was this? I’m starting to feel like the only person who hasn’t done it.”

“We went on a school trip when I was in elementary school. Quit feeling sorry for yourself, it’s definitely coolest the first time you see it.”

Reita gave a begrudging grunt of agreement and then fell silent. Uruha could hear the small, hollow sound his fingers made on the metal of the beer can. He watched as Ruki held his phone up over his head and tried to get a photo of the sky. The light of the screen was distractingly bright, and he could tell that Ruki was getting shot after shot of nothing but blackness. The vocalist tried changing the exposure settings unsuccessfully until he eventually fumbled and dropped his phone onto his chest.

“Fuck.”

“Oh, just put the damn thing away and watch,” Uruha laughed at him. “You know, live in the moment and all that.”

Reita felt a hand brush his shoulder as Ruki groped for the phone where it had slid to the blanket between them. They were all packed pretty close together on one double-size wool army blanket. It would have been a little less strange to lay next to Uruha instead, because in the dark, his sense of touch was filling in for his diminished sight. He was oddly aware of the warmth of Ruki’s arm pressed against his own as the other finally put his phone back in his pocket and got comfortable. Feeling Uruha’s bony shoulder against his would have been nice, but this seemed a little too intimate with Ruki. 

He debated rather Ruki would be offended or would tease him if he scooted just a little further away. One or both seemed likely, so he held still and told himself not to worry about it. They watched in silence for a long time, the current of stars ebbing and flowing as Reita nursed his beer. He had just thought that it was odd that Uruha wasn’t drinking, when a sudden torrent of lights began to cross the sky.

“Oh, wow,” Ruki murmured, and his fingers brushed Reita’s wrist.

He was already watching though, didn’t need Ruki to get his attention as a particularly bright meteor burned all the way past the horizon and disappeared from sight. But Ruki had grabbed firmly onto his wrist anyway, and he didn’t let go.

“If it burns for a long time, it means its big right? You think that one’s going to hit anybody?” Uruha’s voice came from the darkness to his left.

“I think it probably landed on your house. All your guitars... What a shame.” Reita answered, trying to ignore Ruki’s hand.

“Oh, too bad, I guess I’ll just have to move back in with you…”

Reita rolled his eyes and they lapsed into silence again. He was oddly aware of the pulse in his wrist, and he wondered if Ruki could feel it too. The vocalist’s fingers pressed slightly against his skin for a second each time a particularly amazing light shot past. It was kind of odd, almost like Ruki wanted to hold hands with him, a little like the way the band held hands on stage at end of a live, clinging to each other during an adrenaline rush. 

The meteors were falling right to left, lights fizzling out near the treeline. During the lulls in their rain, Reita tried to guess which of the brightest stars were really planets. That one with the reddish glow, near the top of the dome of the sky, might be Mars. After a while, the strange shapes standing above the trees on the horizon resolved themselves into grain silos. It really had been a while since he’d been out this far in the country, hadn’t it? The sky was bright with stars like it had been when he and Uruha had deliberately gotten separated from the rest of their friends during toro nagshi, when they had snuck away to smoke cigarettes on the river bank. They had held hands without ever admitting that that was what they were doing, while they watched delicate lanterns float up to join the stars.

He finished his beer, but didn’t move to get another. Pulling his arm free from Ruki’s grip would require acknowledging that it was there. He didn’t know what Uruha would think of it, if he noticed. They lay and watched for what seemed like hours as the summer night turned cool and the cicadas quieted.

Then Ruki’s hand tightened on his wrist as another white hot star burned a delicate arc across the sky, scratching away the dark for a second. 

“I’m in love with you.” 

It took a moment for Reita to be sure he was the one being spoken too, but Uruha wasn’t responding, and the one Ruki was digging his nails into was him. 

“I have been for years. Ever since… I don’t know.” 

He had no idea what he could say, what he could do other than to just let Ruki talk.

“Remember when you helped me bleach my hair? When you were rinsing it out in the bath at you and Uruha’s apartment? I was waiting for you to lean down and kiss me but you never did. Was I just imagining things?”

He did remember that day. It had been a strangely tender moment, his friend staring up at him silently, head tilted back over the edge of the bathtub. He’d seemed vulnerable like that, his throat so exposed. Reita had knelt on the tile beside him, fully clothed, and washed the bleach from his hair as Uruha sang along with the radio in the kitchen. On the surface, it was all so ordinary for them, but it had been a relief when Ruki closed his eyes. 

He remembered it very clearly, down to the little bleach spot he’d found on his shirt later that day. But it all seemed different in the light of what Ruki had just said. He found that he wasn’t entirely sure if Ruki had imagined it, or if the thought of kissing him had crossed his mind. Why would it have, though, when Uruha had been right across that hall making dinner for them?

Ruki had gone silent, but his grip on Reita’s wrist was still naggingly tight. He was waiting for some kind of answer. Reita dared to turn his head to look at him, and found that his eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to see that Ruki wasn’t watching the stars anymore. His head was rolled to the side and he was watching Reita with that same vaguely imploring expression that he had failed to understand before. Reita got the feeling that Ruki had been staring at him for a while now. 

On Ruki’s other side, he could make out Uruha, leaning on an elbow, watching them and listening quietly. Reita bit his lip, trying to silently ask for help as he made eye contact with the guitarist. This was the strangest situation he’d ever found himself in. If Ruki wanted to tell him this, why now, after all these years? Why in front of Uruha? 

And why wouldn’t Uruha say anything? He was simply watching, curious. He didn’t seem the least bit surprised or bothered, and Reita found that it made things even odder. He and Uruha weren’t much, just a loose association, just barely past the unfathomably wide fine line between friends and lovers. They had always been together, in one way or another, though they never spoke about it. But they had always been faithful in their own way. 

And now Ruki was laying between them, talking about love and making him question his own memory and Uruha was unnervingly silent. Reita looked away from them, up to where the shooting stars were slowing to a trickle. He was going to have to say something eventually, but at the moment ‘sorry’ was all he could think of. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, he was sorry for though. He stalled, watching the flashing red lights of an airplane plod slowly across the sky. It had been fifteen years since an ‘I love you’ from anyone but Uruha had seemed relevant to him.

“He already told me,” Uruha finally spoke up in his unfocused, aimless way, always leaving much unstated. “You have to make up your own mind now.”

But Reita understood easily enough, and found that he’d been given permission. Or burdened with it. If this was a choice he had to make, that meant he had to face it. He had to sift through the things that Ruki was capable of making him feel, instead of letting Uruha be his excuse and his answer. He had to turn and look at them again, and admit that Ruki’s gaze and the warmth of his hand did make him feel something. Could he do that while the man he had loved for longer than he had known Ruki listened?

When he finally turned to look, he found Ruki lying on his side, Uruha close behind him with his head still propped on his hand. His other hand was resting on Ruki’s upper arm and he was almost smiling. Reita found that he was suddenly sure exactly what the question he was being asked was. 

That made answering much easier.

He rolled over to face Ruki, his hand sliding over the soft skin of his arm until he could tangle his fingers with Uruha’s. They held hands like that as he leaned in, and it didn’t seem strange at all. Ruki’s body heat was a comfort in the chill, damp night, and his quiet sigh of relief, the way the nervous tension left him, made Reita realize that this was the obvious answer. Ruki’s hand tangled in his shirt as their lips met, and Uruha’s thumb stoked the back of his hand gently as they kissed. It was only strange that it had taken them so long to figure this out.

**Author's Note:**

> uru is sympathetic because he knows what a pain in the ass it is to be in love with reita...  
> title filched from william blake... don't look for too much meaning in it, it's just a nice image.  
> also, Please recommend me good poly gazette fic.


End file.
